Tweets take their (expletive) place among city's rich literary tradition

Bill Savage, Special to the Tribune

Olivia Clemens, Mark Twain's wife, once tried to shock her husband out of his habit of profane tirades by repeating one to him verbatim. Bemused, he replied that he hoped he didn't sound like that because, "You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune."

In his Twitter novella, "The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel," Dan Sinker has both the words and the tune down. But Sinker's song is much more than an "1812 Overture" of F-bomb-launching cannons. Sinker's work is a knowing, cynical, sentimental and hilarious love song to Chicago, its history, its politics, its artists and its people.

But it is profane as all ... get-out, so you will pardon this review for not quoting it.

The background: On a whim, Sinker started a Twitter feed satirizing the 2010 race for mayor of Chicago from the perspective of a preternaturally foul-mouthed Rahm Emanuel. For the Luddites among us — those who think Twitter's just a medium to let celebrities update their stalkers about what they just had for lunch — that might automatically make the work subliterary.

Twitter limits its tweeters to 140 characters per post, and that's not a lot to work with in terms of creating great art, even as the tweets begin to add up. But brevity in and of itself is irrelevant: What a writer does within the constraints of a chosen form matters most. In his days as a journalist, Ernest Hemingway learned a lot composing 10-word telegrams.

What Sinker has done is both obvious and audacious. He kept within Twitter's limits and then obliterated them. He built an ongoing fictional world with laser-guided focus on the real-world actions of its satirical targets, the battlefield of mayoral campaigns, Chicago's political and media landscape and the city itself.

Full disclosure: After the primary elections in February, I read the website that archived Sinker's entire feed. After I stopped weeping with laughter, I added the text to my course at Northwestern University, "The Chicago Way: Urban Spaces and American Values." Some of the best papers in that class dealt with either the canonical status of a Twitter text (can such a thing be great literature?) or the Chicago content of @MayorEmanuel and how it compared with established Chicago voices like Nelson Algren orMike Royko.

I cannot quote from these papers, either, but I suppose one title can be paraphrased: "'@MayorEmanuel': Blankerblanking Literature."

Chicago literature always wrestles with the conflicts and challenges facing the city, and @MayorEmanuel engages with our present crises. We have an economy still in transition from the postindustrial to whatever the post-postindustrial will be. A paraphrase of Fake Rahm's take on Groupon and Threadless cuts to the heart of this challenge: We used to make things, now we sell each other half-off coupons and T-shirts — "I'm with stupid."

Profanity seems called for, but Sinker's skills extend beyond cussin' satire. The characters who surround Fake Rahm — a fake David Axelrod, Carl the Intern, Quaxelrod the Duck and Hambone the Dog — are as fully imagined and rich as the main character. Carl the intern exemplifies Sinker's comic genius. The obvious and easy move would be to have such a character be a bumbler or a clown, a foil for the star. Instead, Carl is a Lane Tech mathlete, igloo architect extraordinaire and a theoretical physicist who can confirm when a time vortex will close. Plus, he can out-tumble the Jesse White Tumblers. The narrative teems with such Chicago culture, from the Bears and blizzards to Harold's Chicken and Half Acre Brewery.

For readers who aren't political or pop-culture mavens, Sinker annotates the tweets. In epilogues, he tells of how he managed to remain (mostly) unidentified and how he finally came out and took the Real Rahm up on his offer to donate $5,000 to a charity of his choice in exchange for going public. That Sinker chose Young Chicago Authors, a high school writing program, shows where his heart is: with this city and its future writers.

In Chicago, we innovate. Some University of Chicago types start a theater in a saloon and invent modern sketch comedy. Some of them later reject pre-written sketches altogether and give birth to long-form improv. A rumpled victim of McCarthy-era blacklists interviews regular folks about their lives, and oral history emerges as a popular genre. A nightclub booker at the Gate of Horn decides to let a comedian take the stage despite his reputation for obscenity.

David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Del Close and Charna Halpern, Studs Terkel and Lenny Bruce: Meet Dan Sinker. He's one of yours, and one of ours.

Bill Savage is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Northwestern University, where he teaches Chicago literature.